


Mirror Image

by KaenOkami



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Canonical Child Abuse, Clothing, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Family, Family Angst, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:42:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22188835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KaenOkami/pseuds/KaenOkami
Summary: His brothers left no trace of her to remember by. The only way Yut Lung can see his mother again is by looking in the mirror.
Kudos: 36





	Mirror Image

His brothers do not stop with the ruin and destruction of his mother’s body. 

Their late father’s will is mysteriously never found; Yut Lung will always wonder which of them did away with it. After his death, their first order of business had been to slaughter his lover, and their second, carried out the next day, is to divide up Lee Hong Lung’s vast kingdom among themselves. Wang Lung holds court as the six of them make official their claims to the properties, possessions, and areas of business. It is a very cut and dried affair; the death of their father and the matter of their inheritance has been a decades-long topic of discussion between them.

Yut Lung is aware of none of this as it happens. Once his brothers are through with his mother, Hua Lung drags him through the halls of their father’s home, to throw him in the back of a car bound for their aunt and uncle’s. He goes with two heavyset guards on either side of him, and nothing but the clothes on his back. 

For a while after he arrives at his destination, he is certain that he will be his family’s next victim. He is too petrified to move from his bed, too sick to eat or drink. He cannot even change out of his robe, despite the stocked armoire. Despite his aunt and uncle trying to tell him that this is, for now, his home, he can’t stop feeling like a prisoner awaiting death, living in fear of the moment the executioner will come. 

His mind replays the moment of his mother’s death: the flash of silver from Dao Lung’s pocket, the deep curve of the short blade around a pale throat, the darkness of his mother’s blood gushing up and spilling. Wang Lung, still thrusting on top of her, had clenched his teeth and growled as he finished inside her for the final time. The light had left her eyes only a second later.

The replay never ends, not really. It’s at the back of his mind every day and haunts his dreams every night. It doesn’t get easier, he simply falls numb.

It’s a full two or three days before Yut Lung’s terror starts to wear off, and he realizes that the blade is not coming for him. His brothers are content to stuff him out of sight, out of mind. For now, at least, until he’s useful to them. Uncle Mu Lung sits with him at meals and talks about schools and vocational options for him. Skills he ought to learn.

He can’t muster up the energy to stare openly at him, at the gall it takes to pretend that nothing has happened. 

“We can supply you with new clothes for it,” his uncle says, awkwardly adjusting his tie as he looks over the small white robe his nephew is still wrapped in. “In America, you should fit in. Your brothers do.”

Yut Lung is not yet the fierce dragon of night, filled with fire and vengeance, but the mention of his brothers makes his heart thump uncomfortably. Still, he cannot say no. He knows his brothers will not kill him for no reason anymore, but perhaps for a small reason...

His hair is cut short, to match the style of the American boys he will soon be studying with. He doesn’t remember Wang Lung’s face very clearly, but the shadow of resemblance between youngest and eldest brother makes him queasy. His long black ponytail lays limp on the floor like a dead snake.

His aunt helps him try on a suit, tiny and blue and made of material that itches his skin, and he has to resist the urge to fidget in it. There’s a strange child staring back at him from the long mirror, a life-sized doll wrapped in clothes not his own. Had he always had such a blank face, he wonders?

The three of them are shipped off to America in a couple weeks. The worldly possessions that he has been permitted to keep fit in one small carry-on bag, and he has long since said a private farewell to the wardrobe and personal items left in his father’s house. So it comes as a surprise when, in his unfurnished new room, there is a plain but large trunk waiting for him in the middle of the bare floor. 

He approaches it cautiously, and struggles to read the note left on the lid. It’s in the Chinese characters he knows, but in a difficult and unfamiliar hand, so he passes it up to the adults to translate. 

“Uncle Mu Lung...?”

He is surprised to see his uncle’s eyes widen and some of the color leave his face. “Yut Lung, does...does the name Xing mean anything to you?”

His heart leaps into his throat. _“Mother!”_

Without thinking any more, Yut Lung scrambles to unlock the trunk and push the heavy lid up and open, nearly pulling a muscle in his small arms in his fervor. 

It takes him a moment to register exactly what he’s looking at. There’s fabric, lots of it, unfolded and stuffed haphazardly right up to the brim. Colors and patterns he recognizes, but only in glimpses underneath a billowing layer of white and brown. The white is vaguely comforting, sparking a split-second memory of freshly laundered robes, their soft scent under his nose. But the brown, that’s not right, it’s not a shade he recognizes but it’s got a strange odor that he does, what — ?

Blood. _Blood._

His heart freezes. 

He no longer sees the trunk. He sees the knife. He sees it sinking into mother’s throat, dying her dove white robe with a deep, wet crimson stream. It’s all he can see — !

The next thing Yut Lung knows, he is wheezing on the floor, held in a half-sitting position in his aunt’s hands. His uncle is slamming the trunk’s lid shut, with a loud bang. He’s ripped Xing’s death robe away from her other clothes, white-knuckling it in his free fist.

His nostrils are flared and teeth bared with fury, as he curses his older nephews’ names up and down in vicious Chinese.

“Have they not done enough?! Depraved monsters, just like my brother!”

“Darling, quiet!” his aunt cries, looking around as if they’ll burst in to kill her too.

Yut Lung stares up at Mu Lung in a haze. He’d only learned he even had an uncle the day he’d been sent here; his father had never once mentioned his far younger, insignificant brother. But here Mu Lung was, shaking in rage for his sake, looking for all the world like he’d love to dig Hong Lung’s grave up and kill him again. 

Yut Lung realizes with a start that he envies him. He can speak as he pleases, and his brothers will not care...so long as it isn’t their lives being threatened. 

“Nephew, I’m so sorry, we didn’t look first, I’ll get rid of this at once if — “

“No,” Yut Lung hears himself saying, to all of their surprise. He gets to his feet slowly, the sleeves and legs of his new clothes uncomfortably tight and starchy around him. “No, I want it still, I...”

Mu Lung looks from the robe to him, visibly unsettled. “You want...?”

“Not that!” he yelps. He can barely even look at it without his head aching. “But the rest. Please let me keep it? Please?”

His uncle and aunt look at each other, then Mu Lung sighs. “Very well.”

When they leave him alone in the room, Yut Lung ponders over what to do with the trunk, trying not to tremble as he looks at it. Trying not to remember.

Terrifying as it is, he cannot think of getting rid of it. His mother is in there, all he will ever have left of her. So the decision he comes to is that he will shove it under his bed, and keep it there. 

He can’t look, not yet. But he needs to remember. Even at six years old, he knows that. 

~0~

At sixteen, he’s realizing that it’s not so easy. 

Over the past ten years, Yut Lung has moved around several times at his eldest brothers’ behest. Different cities, different countries, different sets of luggage. But one thing he has always insisted on is bringing his trunk with him wherever he goes, no matter how inconvenient a traveling companion it is.

It is still there, after all, a physical thing that cannot fade away. His memories are a different story: as a child with barely a concept of growing up, he had far overestimated his capacity to hang onto them. Xing (whatever surname she may have had was lost to him; the Lee name was all that ever mattered, destroying the lesser things it touched) is gone, despite his desperation to hold onto her. She is less a person now than a shadow, the last remnant of a nightmare that had shaped his entire life.

Everything, from her sweet protection and care of him to the murder scene that ended it, is darker and duller now. Xing’s face is blurring away, the blood and robe just red and white fog. He cannot stop the flow of time any more than he could stop his brothers, but he refuses to give his mother up. Even after ten years...not yet. 

So he has begun to open the trunk more and more often lately. Here at the Dawson house, it sits in a corner of his bedroom, right beside the full-length mirror on his closet door.

Yut Lung kneels before that mirror now as if before an altar. He had washed and combed his hair until it was sleek as silk, letting it fall down his back. It’s a great relief; he really does get sick of tight ponytails, that barely keep him from being mistaken for female. He has selected his very favorite of the robes and dresses tonight, sliding his thin arms into billowing sleeves of midnight blue, securing it tight around his waist with a golden cloth belt that matches the trim. 

Xing was a glimmering star, his one point of light in an oppressively dark sky. Yut Lung is greater and stronger now: the clever dragon in the night, the full harvest moon, the end of this cursed bloodline. 

“Even so, they say I look more like you every day, don’t they...”

If he ever wants to see his mother’s face again, he must look in the mirror like this, and try to recognize her anew. Her hair, her dark eyes, the softness of her lips. The expressions he must try to replicate, never quite succeeding, with no voice left to match to them.

What they have lost cannot be regained, only paid for in blood. But to be wrapped in the same beautiful fabrics that she had worn...it feels more priceless than any of the fancy suits in his closet. It feels like one final hug, in its finite warmth and safety. It almost feels like he is back home again, in his father’s house in Hong Kong, before he had known fear and hatred. 

He looks himself up and down in the mirror. A lovely sight to behold. His mother waiting, back straight, to greet his father at the door. Gorgeous, really, if one knew nothing about them. But it’s not enough.

Gracefully — almost seductively, though of course there’s nobody to seduce — Yut Lung unties and sheds this robe, and sinks his hands into the trunk again for the next. There are so many more memories to reclaim.


End file.
